Meet the Men’s Rights Movement

Who are men’s rights activists, and what do they want?

The Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) is a growing and disproportionately vocal group that believes Western culture and its institutions are contemptuous of men. Men and boys, they argue, are systematically disenfranchised and discriminated against by feminists and their allies. Once dismissed as the looniest and fringiest of the lunatic fringe, men’s rights groups have “gone mainstream” (Salon) and become “frighteningly effective” (Slate), influencing family law and domestic violence legislation, and imposing their views on our national conversations around gender and a host of other social issues.

Today and over the next week, the Good Men Project Magazine will be taking an in-depth look at this controversial movement. Despite the attention they’ve drawn and their relentless effort to make their voices heard, their ideas have yet to receive a thorough and fair hearing by mainstream media. That is, until now.

We’ve invited leading voices in the movement, as well as its outspoken critics, to help us better understand what men’s rights activists believe, why they believe it, and whether we should take their claims seriously.

Men’s rights activists (MRAs) can be easy to dismiss as crackpot extremists. Perhaps best known for descending like outraged locusts on the comments section of your favorite online magazine, newspaper, or blog, bewildering readers with esoteric epithets like “mangina” and “white knight,” they tend not to make a favorable first impression. But if you have the curiosity and thick skin to engage these guys, you’ll find that beneath the hysterical, dogmatic rhetoric lie some valid complaints.

It’s impossible to have a complete discussion of masculinity in the 21st century without acknowledging the men’s rights point of view.

So strap in and leave your delicate sensibilities at the door—it’s time to meet the Men’s Rights Movement.

Men’s rights and other men’s movements have been kicking around since the 1970s. Many sprung up in response—some sympathetic, some hostile—to second-wave feminism. Like feminists, these movements have taken various forms in the pursuit of various, often contradictory goals.

Broadly speaking, they fall into three categories:

The weekend-warrior, drum-circle, pass-around-this-wooden-phallus-and-talk-about-your-dad movement, popularized by poet and author Robert Bly. Known as the mythopoetic men’s movement, these groups tend to focus inward, on interpersonal issues around their own manhood.

The pro-feminist Men’s Studies guys, who like to question and re-imagine standards of masculinity and gender roles. Their conclusions have often led them to take political positions, but their focus is primarily intellectual and academic.

And the men’s and fathers’ rights activists, who believe that men have been oppressed since, well, a really long time ago. They focus on political, legislative, and cultural reformation, from the unjust family court system to entrenched media bias. It’s these guys—the MRAs—who are making the most noise these days. (The “A” in MRA can also stand for “advocate,” depending on which MRA you talk to.)

According to movement leader Paul Elam, whose website, AVoiceforMen.com, is among the most popular online MRA hangouts, the MRM is largely comprised of “men who have been screwed over by a corrupt and oppressive family court system—and those [who] don’t want to be.” Thus anger and frustration—at the courts, at their ex-wives and women in general, at pervasive injustice—tend to be the animating emotions behind the MRM. The down economy, which by all accounts has hit men hardest, continues to boost MRA recruitment and sympathy.

Dan Moore, the publisher of Menz magazine, has been active in the movement for nearly 20 years. He’s “bullish” on the immediate prospects of social change. “I think it will be less than a decade before these issues are resolved. And yes, that’s largely because of this recession,” he said. “But honestly, I think we’re changing the world.”

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MRAs are well known for their tactical assaults on the comments sections of offending feminist and “misandric” (man-hating) blogs and websites. “If you write about them, it’s like feeding a stray cat tuna fish,” a feminist blogger warned me as I was soliciting stories for this package. “Except more like if you feed 100 cats tuna fish—they just show up and hang out and mewl and will completely swarm the place.”

That warning came too late. MRAs haven’t had many nice things to say about the Good Men Project Magazine since our launch last June. Here’s a representative appraisal:

I believe this site, and the viewpoints expressed within it, are toxic, and EXTREMELY harmful to boys and men. And I find the cynical attempt to paint yourselves as helpful in any way to be most disgusting of all. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Toxic, cynical, disgusting, and shameful. Actually, that’s one of the nicer ones. (A healthy percentage of the comments we get from MRAs aren’t fit to reprint here.) When we started getting comments and emails like this one, we were surprised. We were aware of the existence of men’s and fathers’ rights groups, but we had no idea how angry they were, and we certainly didn’t expect to be targeted as feminist “mangina” conspirators, bent on destroying the lives of men and boys everywhere.

Initially, I wrote these people off as insane. It was difficult for me to imagine how anyone could believe they were systematically oppressed by women. Put off by second-wave feminism? OK, I get that. Fed up with political correctness? Though this strikes me as very 1994, I know and love men who still feel that way, so sure, I get that too. But under the thumb of the Great Feminist Oppressors? That’s just hard to take seriously.

But to understand MRAs, their fury, and their almost pathological certainty, you have to understand their definition of the word feminism. MRAs believe Western culture is feminist culture, and that culture, whatever you call it, is oppressive toward men. Thus a feminist is anyone they don’t agree with, regardless of gender. And that’s pretty much everyone.

Last week, when Paul Elam launched his A Voice for Men Radio podcast, he put it this way:

Let’s be clear—this show is not and never will be about the hateful bashing of women, and to be clearer, we’re going to often speak harshly of men … [But] our current gender zeitgeist is one that has promoted and enabled such a degree of female narcissism and entitlement that it has now produced two generations of women that are for the most part, shallow, self-serving wastes of human existence—parasites—semi-human black holes that suck resources and goodwill out of men and squander them on the mindless pursuit of vanity. Is this all women? No, of course not.

Not all women are semi-human, just most—and even if you don’t identify as female, you still may be complicit in maintaining the status quo.

MRAs commenting on this site and elsewhere around the Internet interpret the most radical feminists as speaking for women and governments the world over. No one, for example, takes Valerie Solanis, author of the satirical SCUM Manifesto, quite as seriously—with the possible exception of Andy Warhol, for a split second, in 1968—as men’s rights activists.

They see everything through the lens of a zero-sum gender war. Everywhere, men get a raw deal at the hands of women. Anywhere women have made advances, it’s at the expense of men. In their complaints, across gendered lines, about the draft, civil service, sentencing, and suicide disparities, they appear to ignore salient issues of class and race. To be sure, it’s more powerful men, not feminists, who are the ones sending men off to war and prison.

But for MRAs, everything comes back to their definition of feminists: anyone who supports or tolerates the oppressive culture we live in; thus, powerful men are covered by this definition. They’ve set up a tautological circle from which there is no exit—only progressively deeper certainty.

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It would be easy to write these guys off as nuts and not give them a second thought—if they weren’t so damned persistent. As hard as it is to imagine a Vast Feminist Conspiracy, it’s equally hard to see how anyone could be so invested, so irrepressible, if they didn’t have some skin in the game. Like that blogger told me, these guys hang around. There must be some basis for their tenacity.

There can be little doubt that at least some of these guys have been victims—of physically or psychologically abusive women, the family court system, or other painful circumstances. It’s therefore understandable why they don’t see the benefits of being in the “patriarchy.”

Removed from the hysterical rhetoric, MRAs have some valid complaints. Several movement-affiliated organizations—some more legitimate than others—fight for the rights of male victims of discrimination. Glenn Sacks’ Fathers & Families, a lobbying, PR, and advocacy group that has influenced family law policy around the country, is one. Another is RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting), a nonprofit group that argues that domestic violence is perpetrated equally by men and women.

Fathers & Families, like many men’s and fathers’ rights groups, want men to be recognized as good parents who are equally capable of raising children. They want the courts and society to acknowledge that men can be caring and nurturing dads, and that assuming traditionally female roles is not only not creepy, weird, and emasculating, but can be respectable and, yes, even desirable.

Society seems to resist this acknowledgment, if not by word then by deed.

Consider, for example, this post from The New York Times’ Motherlode blog from December, in which Nicole Sprinkle described how, in looking for childcare for her 3-year-old daughter, she found a friendly, well-spoken applicant from her neighborhood who was studying to be a paramedic. His mother owned a local daycare center. He had worked as a summer camp counselor at the preschool her daughter attended, and “got rave reviews from his supervisor there.”

But he was a man, and that was just too dangerous:

I told him frankly that I liked him best of all and yet still wasn’t sure I could make the leap of letting a man watch my daughter: one who might have to help her wipe, clean her up in case of an accident, who would be alone with her every day for several hours.

I also told him that I felt really awful about having to feel this way, and that it was such a shame that society forced us to discriminate against kind, competent men as caregivers for our kids.

Of course, society didn’t force her to discriminate—she made the choice to discriminate. But it illustrates the point: it’s not just that men are refusing to adjust to new roles, as Hanna Rosin argued in her now-famous “End of Men” article in The Atlantic. When it comes to survival, or the survival of their children, men and women will scramble to adapt. It’s society and its institutions that lag behind.

There are plenty of guys out there who would like to see gender roles not simply reversed—a prospect that has Hanna Rosin twirling with glee and MRAs blitzed on rage-ahol—but obliterated altogether.

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In a recent column for The Wall Street Journal, Lenore Skenazy detailed the very real “Eek! A Male!” phenomenon: “almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep,” she wrote. “Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.”

In this culture, men who choose to work among (or even just near) kids are suspect. Among the handful anecdotes she presents as evidence: an Iowa daycare worker who isn’t allowed in the room when diapers are being changed and a guy who sent kids running and screaming when he rolled down his window to ask for directions.

Then there’s Timothy Murray, the Massachusetts Lt. Governor, who, while pulling two small children from a burning minivan, narrowly escaped the wrath of their grandmother. She thought he might be a kidnapper. “I was gonna smack him,” she told a local TV station. “I yelled, ‘Get away from my car!’”

MRAs rightly point to this as a troubling phenomenon. But is feminism, as many MRAs suggest, really the prime mover behind it? I suspect we’ll have the chance to debate this question in the comments section, below.

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For “The End of Men,” Rosin interviewed a divorced dad named Darrell—he’d lost his job laying sheet metal, fallen behind on his child-support payments, and was attending a fathering class in order to avoid jail time. Despite getting trucking and bar tending licenses, he couldn’t find work, and lost his house and car. He described sitting at a bus stop, watching his wife drive past. “‘[She] looked me right in the eye,’ he recalled, ‘and just drove on by.'”

Darrell, like so many other casualties of this recession, must feel blindsided by circumstance. And as Hanna Rosin will tell you, he’s representative of a growing number of American men.

We have to expect that there will lots more disaffected, disillusioned guys out there in the years to come, struggling to understand how they fit in to a changing world—which means we can expect interest in men’s issues to grow.

The Good Men Project Magazine is in a unique position to help guys grapple with their evolving roles and what many men see as conflicting and even impossible societal expectations. Our mission has always been to challenge men to think deeply about themselves and their place in the world, and that’s the goal this week.

Let us not forget the propaganda and diminution of men in society. Let’s start with the most offensive misandristic and racist ad by Campbell’s Soup Company for V8 with a white woman humiliating and physically abusing a black man. Then we have ads by AT&T and Allstate to humiliate and denigrate men. Few follow the pattern of Subaru in showing men as caring fathers and intelligent human beings. Such disrespect and humiliation of women would not be tolerated.

LeJacquelope here. You can see my website, I’m known for my controversial and confrontational style of men’s rights advocacy. I also have more accusations of misogyny to my name than the average Taleban fighter. I joke about that because, obviously, I think those accusations are hilariously wrong but again, you can see my blog in all its fire breathing glory. My extremist creds will never be in doubt. That said, I am appalled that you’d refer to Paul Elam as a “leader” of the movement. It’s not your fault, though. Some people think Osama Bin Laden was a Muslim leader,… Read more »

Equality, and a completely unbiased society, is an absolute impossibility. The human race, simply put, can not agree on everything. Our race is based on conflict. To say that we should all be treated completely equal is rather foolish. I understand that many will disagree with me on this thought. I even understand that people will call me an idiot and some neanderthal like imbecile. Simply put, however, completely equal treatment, not only amongst the sexes, but amongst us all, is impossible. Our belief structures are too different. Even our very psychological standpoints are different. On all occurrences, we need… Read more »

The Mra is a group of highly intelligent men who have form an alliance to provide men and young men with an alternative to traditional “man up” gender roles. This is a growing Movement of more then 2 Million men witch have recognized the unfairness in gender role , Such as , slave provider , A prison economy and Hypergamy . Simply the MRA is an honest voice in a sea of lies . Young men often make the decision to venture into traditional gender roles uninformed of the future implications of feminist dishonesty and hypergamy . Every men life… Read more »

[…] What’s really important to understand is that this really and truly is how some people think w… So no, I don’t find it that mind-blowing to read a book that reinforces these ideas. It’s actually quite predictable. […]

How can that woman have the nerve to say that men aren’t oppressed when we’re continually faced with negitive judgements in the case of child custody, divorce and child support? When I got divorced my ex-wife got our house, the car, all the money in our bank account and full custody of our child. How is that right or fair? I got laid off in 2010, and was therefore unemployed, and my ex-wife was awarded $500 a month for child support. State law says that if you are unemployed that they have to base child support off of minimum wage;… Read more »

This site seems more for Feminist it does not seem to support Mens Rights and actually seems leary of it so I have to assume that this was perhaps written by a man or a man that is surely getting something from a women . feminism leads to not just decline of man but the destruction of our country. From books on Islam from Christianity to Indian cultures around the globe we see that it is mans duty to be the head of the family . We are watching men being pushed into corners commiting suicuide in record numbers that… Read more »

Rober, I think you are correct. The Good Men Project and Men’s Studies in academia are journalism directed at males through a feminist lens and Men’s Studies, sex and gender studies program for males within a feminist analytical framework. Thus, we have how feminism operates. It operates as an ideology and analytical framework. Males studies would reject the feminist ideology and framework to let men speak within and from their own masculinity, a masculinity that is good, right and just. We can narrow the good men down. One of them is not this author.

Rob, It is unfortunate to what our society has become between a man and woman in marriage. All too often the sacrifices that are made go unnoticed. I personally am going through some very tough times – unemployed, educated, forced from my home in July of 2012, paying child support, have custody of my children at a rate of 13 percent per year. The divorce process has been exhausting and especially to my 3 beautiful little girls ages 8 and under. They ask me when I have them if their Daddy will ever come back home. It has been tough…very… Read more »

I’ll answer this question for you. They’re a bunch of bitter old assholes who are hellbent on making white American men look as misogynist and shallow as possible. They’re an embarrassment to white men everywhere. White American men should bash these losers until they go away, and white men outside of the US should not embrace their ideology.

Hi, everyone. I recently created a petition at change.org asking a clinic in Silverthorne, Colorado to stop performing neonatal circumcision and I was hoping if you would feature the petition on your page.

I never understood why MRAs don’t consider themselves feminists. Or vice versa. Frankly, the problems that both of these groups address are all a result of the gender binary that exists. By assuming that men and women are inherently different (other than biologically, and even then, there are gray areas) from one another, we encourage sexism on both fronts. e.g. By assuming a woman’s place is at home, we get fathers who unfairly lose child custody battles because mothers are seen as more motherly. Both men and women are entrapped by the binary.

I find it disgusting that anyone can say that men are not currently disadvantaged, especially in the United States. When you can not watch television for longer than 10 minutes without seeing some commercial or show that insinuates that men want nothing more than sex, money, alcohol, violence or fast cars. There are advertisements out there that insinuate that inside every man is a rapist waiting to get out. You who state that there is no gender bias against men in the United States need to wake up. I went through a divorce a year and a half ago. When… Read more »

This series, “Meet the Men’s Rights Movement,” is a useful beginning. But the series needs a few thousand more articles to get beyond the scatching-the-surface stage that it has reached at this point. The article “A Word for Men’s Rights” was published in 1856. The first female judge to publicly condemn legal misandry made her views known in 1921. The first Men’s Rights organization was started in 1926; its strongest supporters were women (mothers of boys). Billions of dollars have been spent on the fabrication of a history of the relations of the sexes from a “social contructionism” point of… Read more »

Men walking around Ball State University campus with red painted nails aren’t cross-dressing; they’re taking part in an initiative to stop violence against women. Operation Red Jungle at Ball State University, a campus wide initiative, is geared toward bringing awareness to stopping the violence. Emily Sullivan, president of Ball State’s Timmy Global Health, volunteered her time on Tuesday to ask men passing by if they wanted to take the pledge. “It’s really great to see people supporting this campaign and I think it’s just a matter of continuing to have events and to encourage other organizations to participate to host… Read more »

There is no mention here of the Men’s Rights movent’s of the 1920s-1940s. For good reason; almost nobody knows about it. There is not a single professor who has written about it. In contrast, if you want to know what any women’s rights activist of the same period had for breakfast any given day you can find three books and 20 articles that will give you every detail. But you can now get some info on pre-1960s Men’s Rights activism at “The Unknown History of MISANDRY.” One aspect of this history that is of special interest is the voices of… Read more »

Sub: DO MEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO SAY NO TO THEIR SEXUAL URGES Respected Sir, My name is Jose Isaac and my address is Chackuayil House, Valyakulam, Changanacherry, Kottayam District, Kerala State – 686106 , INDIA. My cell number is 9496123796 and land line is 0481 – 2725167. Hypocracy, (ego and public image) prevents an average man from admitting that he is AS attracted to the mere outline of a woman’s sex organs like breasts AS he is to a woman’s exposed sex organs and any other exposed part of her flesh. It is only natural for man to have… Read more »

What is shocking to me that in my 33 years alive on this planet I have never meet one young black man that can rent in his own ghetto .I have meet veterans that have built hud homesbut they cant live in them how freaking sick can we get .I know things will be turning around because our system is falling apart and our men are so displeased with life liivng is becoming a horrible task for millions. It seems logical that the only way to create more happiness is be creating a entirely new financial system in which China… Read more »

Men’s Rights Movement is not a movement begging any privilege for men, it stands for gender equality. It stands for ending discrimination against men with gender neutral laws for true equality. It stands for honour and dignity of men. Since the first day of human civilization, Men are sacrificing their blood to protect women, children and society. It is Men, who are doing back breaking labour to get food for women and children. Against any threat to society and people, it is men who are sacrificing their life on frontiers. It is the Men, who are paying most taxes to… Read more »